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Finally Finals 6.2.06 |
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Finals are next week, and that means that the complain train is
starting. I don't think anybody minds hearing a little stressful
venting; that comes with the territory. What starts to get old,
fast, is the one-upsmanship about how 'busy' we really think we are. First off, it's not a competition. Second off, you're not nearly as busy as you think you are. Thirdly, studying for finals after skipping classes throughout the quarter is a far inferior system to just going to class. But the worst of the worst is people who complain about the number of questions on the test. "I have a 150-question final." "Mine has 200." "Yeah? Well my final has 350 questions." You want the test long. You want as many questions as possible. Why? Simple statistics, team. Think about it this way. You are a lottery ticket holder--but not one lottery ticket. You have 90 of the 100 lottery tickets. When the lottery drawing comes, do you want your professor to pull 1 ticket, or 10? 10 tickets, or 50? Come to think of it, wouldn't you like him to pull all 100? That's what it's like. If you do the work, and study, but don't go insane doing it, you'll probably have around 80-90% of the material down pat. Do you want your professor to ask 3 questions? No, because those three might just happen to be the 3 on material you're not confident on. You want the most questions possible. You didn't spend that time going to class and studying to be asked 10 questions, have 4 of them be over some arcane fact he tossed out while everyone was packing up, and end up with a D. A little more technically, you want the biggest sample size possible. The larger the random sample size, the more accurate the statistics will be--that's why Reuters polls a couple thousand people for their political estimates, and not a couple dozen. If your knowledge is the population, and 90% of that population is good, you want the largest possible sample--it greatly increases your odds of having an accurate measurement of the knowledge you have gained. Nowadays when people say "Oh man, I have a 400 question final coming up...why do they have to have so many [choice word] questions? I better go study." I say, "Yeah, you better go study--especially if its your statistics final." |
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Copyright MMVI, Beef |
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